Historically, instant lottery tickets (e.g., scratch-off lottery tickets) are offered for sale in games where the total number of winners and total prize value are known and advertised to players based on the total number of tickets produced for each game. Of course, not all of the tickets are on sale simultaneously. Once delivered to a lottery, tickets are stored in a warehouse and delivered to retailers on a periodic basis, as sales of the game proceed. Thus, some tickets remain in a lottery warehouse, some reside in delivery vehicles and others are delivered to retail locations but are not yet on sale. Today, a lottery typically does not know which tickets are actually on sale in retail locations. Accordingly, players are not informed of the prizes actually on sale and available to be won at a retail location, on a near real time, daily or other periodic basis.
Today, instant lottery games are sometimes discontinued because all the top-prize tickets in the game have been claimed by players, even though many tickets remaining for sale in the game still have value. For example, in most instant lottery games, a set of tickets is printed with play or prize value indicia under a scratch-off coating according to a predetermined prize structure. Typically, the prize structure consists of one or more large-value or ‘top’ prizes, a number of lesser value prizes and a large number of tickets that are not prize winners. The prize values in a game are imaged pseudo randomly on the tickets so that, in theory, each player has an equal chance to win one of the prizes.
In certain circumstances, however, problems arise as a game's tickets are sold and as the top prizes are claimed. For example, there have been complaints from customers that it is no longer possible to win one of the top prizes as advertised by the lottery administration in its general promotional literature. There are, for instance, certain lottery administrations in the United States that post on their web sites the remaining prizes within a game based on claimed winners, not on actual ticket sales. As the game is sold, the tickets having the various prizes are cashed, including the top prizes; and the lottery will update the website with the remaining prizes within the game. However, in many cases, the game will still have a significant number of winning tickets to be sold after the top prizes are cashed, yet the game loses appeal to customers. At other times a game may remain on sale because the last top-prize winning ticket has been sold but not claimed by a player. Or, the pack containing the prize may be languishing in the storage area of a retailer, forgotten and never offered for sale.
Historically the lottery game supplier has provided a lottery administration with just two prize structures. The first is the end of production prize structure which details information such as: the number of winners of each prize level, the number of non-winners, the odds of winning each prize, the overall odds of winning any prize, the minimum prize value per pack and the total value of the prizes delivered to the lottery. The second is the end of game prize structure that details all the prizes paid by the lottery following the end of sales of a game.
What is need in the industry is a system and method that provide a means to calculate an on-sale prize structure and to securely inform potential consumers of the prize value, number of winners and general availability of instant lottery game tickets currently on sale at retail locations to entice continued play of the game without jeopardizing integrity of the game or encouraging fraud. Where, the on-sale prize structure includes prizes from all packs that are available for sale from being loaded in a dispenser. The present invention addresses this need.